News Desk
In the flickering glow of cable news screens and the endless scroll of digital headlines, a familiar story is taking shape. Iran, a nation of 85 million souls perched at the crossroads of history, is once again cast as the West’s latest existential foe.
From Fox News to the BBC, from The Guardian’s measured indignation to The Daily Telegraph’s hawkish warnings, a chorus of voices has coalesced around a single refrain: Iran is a threat—a nuclear menace, an extremist regime, a terror-spreading pariah. But beneath this drumbeat lies an older, more troubling pattern, one that echoes the West’s colonial past and its enduring instinct to wield fear as a weapon.
This is not a new script. It is a playbook refined over centuries, one that scholars like Edward Said dissected in his seminal work Orientalism: the West’s penchant for painting the East as a chaotic, inferior “other,” ripe for intervention. Today, that lens is trained on Iran, and the parallels are stark. Just as the specter of terrorism was marshaled to justify invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, a similar narrative is now being spun to undermine Tehran—only this time, the stakes feel higher, the rhetoric sharper, and the public’s fatigue more palpable.
Tune into CNN or France24 on any given evening, and the imagery is unrelenting: grainy footage of Iranian drones and maps flashing red with “proxies” from Yemen to Lebanon. Conservative outlets like The Daily Telegraph warn of Iran’s “Islamic ideology” seeping beyond its borders, a global contagion that must be stopped. Liberal voices, meanwhile, decry the Iran’s human rights abuses, framing it as a moral imperative to act. Together, they form a pincer movement—fear on one flank, righteousness on the other—softening the ground for what many fear is an inevitable clash.
“It’s a conditioning exercise,” says Dr. Leila Hosseini, an Iranian-American scholar of media studies at Georgetown University. “The colonial West has long used its cultural machinery to dehumanize its adversaries. With Iran, we’re seeing a textbook case: amplify the threat, erase the context, and prime the public for war.”
That context, though, is inconveniently complex. Iran’s regional maneuvers—its support for Hezbollah, its ballistic missile program—are real and provocative. Yet they exist in a web of reciprocal hostility: U.S. sanctions that strangle its economy, Israeli strikes on its assets, decades of Western meddling dating back to the 1953 coup that toppled Mohammad Mossadeq. These threads rarely surface in the Western Islamophobic narrative, which prefers a simpler tale of good versus evil.
This selective storytelling carries the whiff of empire. In the 19th century, Britain and France justified their dominion over the Middle East and subcontinent and parts of Southeast Asia with tales of backwardness and savagery, casting themselves as enlightened custodians. Now, Iran is framed as a “conservative” relic ruled by “hardliner mullahs,” a foil to the West’s self-image as the guardian of a free world.
It’s a dichotomy that filmmaker John Pilger exposed in his 2010 documentary The War You Don’t See, which traced how Western policies, not just local tyrants, fuel the region’s chaos.
The terrorism label, too, has become a cudgel, wielded with precision. Just as it was used to delegitimize Baghdad or Kabul, it now clings to Tehran like a second skin. “Iran’s proxies are terrorists, its ideology is terroristic—repeat it enough, and it sticks,” says former Pentagon official turned critic of U.S. foreign policy. “But it’s a tactic, not a truth. It’s how you rally a war-weary public to a cause they’d otherwise question.”
Lurking beneath this rhetoric is an unspoken endgame: regime change. The West has chased this mirage before—Mossadeq’s ouster, Saddam Hussein’s fall, Libya’s descent into chaos. With Iran, the drumbeat has quickened since the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in 2024, for exploitation.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House, coupled with his shifting calculus on cleansing in Gaza and robbing of Ukraine, has only fueled the speculation. Could Iran, long a geopolitical thorn, be the next domino?
The media’s role in this escalation is subtle but unmistakable. When a U.S. drone strike sparks an Iranian retaliation, the former is a footnote, the latter a headline.
When Israel bombs Iranian targets, it’s “self-defense”; Tehran’s response is “aggression.”
This asymmetry mirrors what Said called the “cultural hegemony” of the West—an ability to shape reality through narrative, drowning out the other side.
Yet the public is not as pliable as it once was. After two decades of war in the Middle East, trust in institutions, including the press, has frayed. Polls show Americans are wary of another conflict; a 2024 Pew survey found just 29 percent favor military action against Iran over its nuclear program. “People see the pattern,” says Hosseini. “They’ve been sold this story before—Iraq, Syria, Libya. The question is whether exhaustion trumps fear this time.”
For now, the conditioning continues. The headlines churn, the talking heads debate, and the specter of a nuclear Iran looms larger with each broadcast. It’s a slow burn, a psychological siege rooted in a macho colonial mindset that refuses to fade. And as the West gazes across the Gulf, it’s worth asking: Are we being prepared for war—or simply reminded of who we’ve always been?
Image credit: Dirk Holvoet
